Things have slowed a bit now with Summer holidays and vacations. But fear not, we've still been busy working to bring you the latest fixpacks and releases for your products to make sure you're running in the best possible environments you can. So, why not take this quiet summer Monday, grab another cup of coffee, and check out the following Rational downloads which have been released over the past few weeks since July 27th, 2012:

ClearCase MultiSite environments that synchronize data in one directionrequire special handling during the planning and implementation ofbackup and recovery procedures for replicated VOBs. One-waysynchronizations are often mandatory in secure environments where datacan’t be transferred out from a secure server.

This white paper helps to further explain what is needed to implement asuccessful backup and recovery strategy for sites that synchronizereplicas in a one-way sync pattern.

A big thank you to Karl Weinert, Brian Cowan and Denise McKinnon for writing and publishing this whitepaper!

ClearCase version 8.0 introduced both a VOB Schema and Feature Level update to allow for new functionality within the release. To be able to benefit from these changes, existing ClearCase 7.x and prior VOBs will require both a database reformat and then an update to the new Feature Level. While a ClearCase version 8.0 VOB server can support both Schema 54 and Schema 80 VOBs simultaneously, careful planning must be done to minimize downtime and ensure a successful migration from Schema 54 to 80 as well as the Feature Level update.

Wanted to let you know that this weekend, we'll be performing some critical maintenance on our systems, and as such, our technical support content will be unavailable for a period of time between 9:00 pm ET October 30 2010 and 7:00 am ET October 31 2010.

What you can expect:

The IBM Support Portal will be operational, and Site Availability and News portlet will contain information on the outage

Search will provide results; but links will not reach content

Also, if you have been relying on redirects to get to our support content (i.e. http://www.ibm.com/rational/support), those redirects will not work during the outage, so this would be a good time to change your bookmarks, and bookmark the Portal at:http://www.ibm.com/support/entry/portal

Upon starting Rational Publishing Engine (RPE) Document Studio or generating a document using RPE Launcher, RPE checks out a license. If RPE does not successfully obtain a license, you will get a licensing error. This post explains how to resolve common RPE licensing errors. While this post is specific to RPE, these troubleshooting techniques can be used to resolve licensing problems in other Rational products that use FLEXnet licenses.

Usually, the RPE licensing error will be in a pop-up window titled "No License Available" with an error like:

Cannot read data from license server system.
The license server system appears to be running, but is not responding. If this persists, notify the System Administrator.
(The license server manager (lmgrd) and vendor daemon processes should be terminated and restarted.)
Feature: RPE_PUBLISH
Hostname: license server host name
License path: port@host, full path to license file, or a combination of these; multiple items are delimited by a semi-colon
FLEXnet Licensing error:-16,287
For further information, refer to the FLEXnet Licensing documentation, available at "www.macrovision.com".

Licensing errors are more common in complex licensing environments -- for example, if USER_BASED licenses are used or in environments with firewalls that can block the license server ports. The following are common causes of licensing problems:

A firewall is blocking access to the license server port(s).

The license server is not running.

If you are using USER_BASED licenses, syntax errors in the license server options file can also prevent RPE from obtaining a license.

RPE can also fail to get a license if the license server or the licenses themselves are too old for that version of RPE.

Troubleshooting the issue

Before you can fix the licensing error, you need to figure out what is causing it:

Verify that all the information displayed in the error you get is correct. The information in the error will help you uncover problems resulting from an incorrect configuration -- for example, if the port or host name is wrong. You should also verify that the host name -- exactly as spelled in the error -- successfully resolves on the network from the RPE machine having the problem.

Look at the license server's license.log file to see what is going wrong. The errors in the license.log file will help you find problems with the licensing environment. The errors in the license.log file will uncover problems like:

The license server or license files are too old.

There are syntax problems with the license server options file.

The license server is not running.

The client workstation cannot reach the license server (this happens when you get a licensing error in the client but there are no corresponding entries in the license.log file).

If you see an error like the following:(lmgrd) Failed to open the TCP port number in the license.

That would indicate that either the port in the license server configuration (or license file) is incorrect, or that the license server port is being blocked by a firewall. It could also indicate that the license server is not running.

If you use USER_BASED licenses, check your license server's options file. Syntax errors in this file can prevent RPE from checking out a license. Generally, there will be errors in the license.log file (reflecting license denials) if there are options file syntax errors.

Fixing the problem

There are several things you can do to resolve licensing problems, depending on what is causing them:

In some environments, it is possible to swap out the USER_BASED licenses for regular floating licenses. If you are in such an environment and do not need the extra features from USER_BASED licenses, go ahead and make the switch, as floating licenses are easier to get working.

Whether you switch to floating licenses or not, make sure that the license server is pointing at the correct license file and that the port in the license file is available on your system (use netstat to check).

Make sure the RPE workstation can reach the license server on the network. Some commands you can use to verify this:

ping <license_server_host_name_or_IP>
telnet <port_number>

Resolve any network problems found.

If you need to use USER_BASED licenses, resolve any syntax errors in the license server options file.

Start (or restart) your license server:

if it is not running

if you changed the license file or the license server options file

If needed, reconfigure the RPE workstation to find the license server -- you would need to do this if you had to change the license server port. If the license server port is wrong, you will see that in the error details of the licensing error. To fix it, you will need to update the TELELOGIC_LICENSE_FILE environment variable on the RPE workstation.